Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)consists of several resource constrained sensor nodes
distributed over an specific geographical area. WSNs are typically energy constraint
due to the fact the sensor nodes are battery powered.
Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols used in WSNs are usually designed to
be power aware, i.e., they are more energy efficient than MAC protocols used for other
ad-hoc wireless networks such as IEEE 802.11 [2]; to increase the lifetime of the nodes.
Traditional MAC protocol implementations are done for specific hardware platforms
using a monolithic approach. Therefore, it is very difficult to port from one
platform to another without modifying the whole implementation protocol. This
reduces code reusage and increases the implementation efforts.
We have designed and implemented a toolchain which allows to design and prototype
MAC protocols for WSNs in a simple manner. In addition, it allows non-specific
sensors users to implement and execute them in sensor nodes without worrying about
technical specifications of the platforms. The toolchain has been implemented in
TinyOS using a component-based design. Special care has been taken to ensure hardware
independence of the protocol implementations described in this thesis has been
integrated with [1] to allow runtime reconfiguration of MAC protocols.
We have evaluated our toolchain against monolithic implementations in terms of
memory consumption and execution time. The results show that the toolchain introduces
an acceptable memory and execution time overhead, less than 5 %, compared
to the monolithic approach and substantially eases the implementation efforts.